GR#162 - Lithone 2005

[cels]

A very early WIP, but I'd just like to know if I've committed any obvious cardinal sins in terms of composition before I go along with this.

EDIT

Latest version here:

[Cyangmou]

visual weight:
too much visual weight on the right side.
mirroring the heavy part of the background ("cube" with door) that it appears on the left side should make it more balanced

focus:
it's also not a really good idea to place the characters directly in the foreground if you use a 1 point perspective, since this perspective pulls you really towards the center.
It's good usable if you have 1 main char which is exactly in the vanishing point and you will get the attention there, but currently the lines lead you to an uninteresting gray backwall panel.

[cels]

Much appreciated, Cyangmou! Cheers. To be continued.


Take two!



Now, I'm not really sure about the rule of odds here. The orange character is closer than the others. There's a total of six characters here, but I wonder if I should apply the rule of odds to the whole group or to the five characters in the middle.

I did intend the blue ball to be the focus here. It's an artifact of sorts.

[sevinkydink]

Cels,

This is coming along really well.  Is the mesh within the back piece supposed to curve? Right now it looks kinda flat.  Keep going!

[cels]

Cheers, sevinkydink. For some reason, I thought a flat texture would make sense for a force field, even when it's curved. A bit of a brainfart there, so thanks for pointing it out.



I'm currently experimenting a lot with the reflections, because I haven't really been able to find any good tutorials. When I search for tutorials on chrome effects, I either get photoshop tutorials or someone drawing a metal ball with charcoal. When I search for window reflections, I get silly tutorials about how to draw mirror images in windows or how to draw a glass vase.

At this point:
- I understand that the glass reflection is probably not correct, but I don't understand the different ways of drawing glass reflections and how these depend on the light sources.
- The metal reflections are probably not correct anywhere, but I'm going for a 1980's cartoon style and it's proving impossible to find a tutorial, so I'm just watching old cartoons.
- I'm having a lot of trouble understanding the relationship between reflections on metal objects and their light source. How do you decide the reflections of light on a given flat metal surface in relation to the light source? How do you decide the gradient on a single metal surface compared to many smaller metal surfaces forming a bigger surface?

[API-Beast]

Angles my friend.

Lighting mostly depends on angle and not much on distance at all. As such you won't really have gradients unless you have curved surfaces. For spot lights/directional you shouldn't have any gradients. Point lights are a bit trickier since even on a flat surface light is hitting it from different angles at different points, but that is only really noticeable if a object is very near to the point light itself.

However, metal is reflective, as such even on a flat surface you will see some strong highlights, but these highlights don't come from the diffuse lighting at all, they are just a reflection of the light source, as such it is not as uniform. Metal tends to be quite dark with some very bright spots on it from reflections.

[cels]

Thanks! I understand that angles are more important than distance. That's what I was trying to convey in that little illustration - the problem is I have no idea how angles impact the reflection.

If you have the time at some point, I'd love to see an edit where you explain what you mean. Words can only transmit so much information to my dull mind.

And I would like to stress that I'm not going for photorealism here, I'm trying to imitate the style used in 1980's cartoons. Here's an example from a Silverhawks episode, but you can find virtually the same style in 9/10 popular cartoons from the 1980s.

[Probo]

ive always thought those diagonal band reflections in old cartoons were just stylistic most of the time, and not realistic? id like to hear more on that

edit: I should add, when i have used them ive always drawn them with the highest point of the diagonal being nearer the lightsource and the lowest point being further away, but apart from that i always thought it was kind of winging it, a quick way to make things look like reflective without having to draw the world reflected in the material. particularly in low budget animation

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Yeah, the diagnols are basically just the animators trying to simulate the different bands of light that would appear on the metal but without actually trying to render out the enviroment onto their reflective metal, which would be more "correct".

[Probo]

just occured to me that its easiest to do on flat surfaces with no curvature too, which with that in mind may actually have had in impact on some of the designs.